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LCRA dinged for hiring practices and lack of transparency

Even as the Lower Colorado River Authority, the utility that supplies water to more than a million Central Texans, is a “sophisticated, well-functioning organization,” it lacks transparency and should hire more women and people of color, according to a state report released Thursday.

In Bastrop County, for instance, where the river authority has laid claim to thousands of acre-feet of underground water that it wants to pump and export to Travis County, the LCRA passed up chances to hold informal public meetings about exporting groundwater with members of the community, the sunset staff reported.

“Opposition has since swelled,” the sunset investigators observed, with critical opinion pieces running in newspapers and rejections of subsequent offers of LCRA to meet.

The utility is “on the defensive, working uphill against a public trust shortage it might have alleviated with more preemptive public engagement on this project.”

"All my life I have drawn sustenance from the rivers and from the hills of my native state... I want no less for all the children of America than what I was privileged to have as a boy."-Lyndon B. Johnson